Best-Handling Car For Less Than $40,000

We match up six affordable athletes to find the cornering champ.

Handling, in the simplest terms, can be defined as how a car responds to driver inputs and how it communicates feedback. Are the responses and feedback smooth? Do they inspire confidence? Does the car have insanely high limits? Does it approach those limits gradually? Feel connected? We take all this into consideration with every car we test. But rarely do we isolate each individual handling trait, tear it apart, and put it back together to the degree we’re about to here.

Last October, we selected seven cars to compete for the title of best-handling car for less than $100,000. This year, we decided to lower that price cap to put it within reach of more car enthusiasts, with a minimum of financial finagling or illegal activity required. All the cars here can be purchased, with all their performance-enhancing options (big brakes, sport packages, and summer tires, for example), for less than $40,000.

At this point, you might be asking, Where’s the BMW? The omission of a Bavarian representative was not intentional. The next-generation 2012 3-series sedan goes on sale in February, and so it seemed silly to include a 2011 model that would be all but done by the time this issue’s ink dried. A suitable 328i coupe (which continues through the 2012 model year on the existing platform) or 128i were unavailable. A 135i with the M Sport package breaks the $40K cap.

The sweet-of-chassis Mazda RX-8 was also a non-starter. Sadly, 2011 is the final year for the rotary until further notice.

Four of the cars’ base prices are more than $30,000; two are less. There are two front-drivers, three rear-drivers, and one four-wheel-drive machine. It’s a motley crew of body styles, and half of them (Miata, Mustang, and GTI) are reigning 10Best champs. Only the Nissan and the Mazda are sports cars from the ground up. The remaining four have more plebeian roots.

We once again called upon vehicle-behavior consultants Cayman Dynamics to assist us in the acquisition of empirical data. The company’s ability to systematically dissect a chassis and its subsystems goes far beyond our attention span, so we limited it to four critical tests [see here].

The sub-40 six were subjected to serious scrutiny. We spent two days bombing southeast Ohio’s roller coaster of Appalachian tarmac, followed by a full day of instrumented proving-grounds testing to find ­lateral acceleration, braking distances, and slalom velocity. We then capped off the inquiry with an extra-full day of lapping the 2.2-mile gem called Grattan Raceway Park to get full, unabridged impressions of each car’s limits and behaviors. Lap times were recorded and broken down into sectors for analysis but played no role in the finishing order.

The final ranking would be decided by how our panel of judges voted in 10 distinct handling categories. To wit:

We broke overall steering feel into three parts. STEERING RESPONSE deals with how a car reacts to wheel inputs. Is the response smooth or choppy? Does the vehicle require constant correction? Is there a big delay between input and direction change?

How well the steering communicates tire distress and road imperfections falls under STEERING FEEDBACK.

ON-CENTER FEEL is as it sounds—you want a little resistance in the steering wheel off the 12 o’clock position but not too much.

Perfect CHASSIS BALANCE, a 10 on our scale, would mean that the car behaves neutrally at the tires’ adhesion limit, neither pushing with its front wheels (understeer) nor swinging wide with its rears (oversteer). Excessive understeer or oversteer would lower this score.

What we call TRANSIENT BEHAVIOR refers to how a car transitions between two vectors. Think of all the things a skier has to do to change direction—are his body movements economical and crisp? That’s what we’re looking for here.

On a related note, excessive roll or pitch would bring down a BODY-CONTROL score.

BREAKAWAY BEHAVIOR deals with how a car reacts to finding and exceeding its limits. Snap or lift-throttle oversteer would shave a point or two from this score.

BRAKE FEEL AND RESPONSE are combined into one category. A brake pedal should be firm and easy to modulate without a dead spot in the first few inches of travel.

ERGONOMICS refers to the man-machine interface. In this test, we limit ergonomics to handling-related aspects. For example: The driver’s seat, pedal placement, and driving position—not the switchgear—determine a car’s score.

FUN TO DRIVE is, well, pretty much self-explanatory.

All six cars, just by virtue of being on this list, are starting with pretty high base-level credentials. But only one will claim the title of best-handling car for less than $40,000.